I wish to give people an opportunity to share their experiences of how they came to be receptive to the ideas presented in this website, as well any value they have derived from this website. If you would like to have your ideas presented alongside mine in the “testimonials” section feel free to email them to me at dmackler58@aol.com. Alternatively, feel free to sign into the guestbook and share your comments there.

Testimonial #1: by Daniel Mackler, creator of iraresoul.com

Testimonial #2: by Rebekah Shaw, psychotherapist in England

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Testimonial #1: by Daniel Mackler, creator of iraresoul.com

I am fairly certain I saw Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child around my home as a child – probably belonging to my mother – but as with most adult psychology books, I wasn’t much interested. I didn’t actually read The Drama of the Gifted Child until the summer of 1999 – when I was in my late-20s – and I picked it up rather by chance. At that point I was entering graduate school and was about to begin work as a therapist, and despite having already done a huge amount of inner psychological exploration by that point, I still hadn’t read too much psychology. I felt that if I was going to become a therapist it was only appropriate that I started reading up on the field.

So I went to my local library in New York City and perused the psychology stacks, hoping to find something interesting. The first book I pulled out was The Drama of the Gifted Child, and I brought it home and read it. I found it fairly good, but I thought to myself, “Yeah, it’s pretty good – but this stuff is pretty obvious, and I know it all already.” I returned it to the library and didn’t think much more about Miller for about a year.

In that intervening year I read many more psychology books, and found them mostly atrocious. I also began work as a therapist, and discovered that almost everyone I came into contact with in the mental health field – professors, supervisors, fellow students, and other therapists – were downright primitive, and mostly radically in denial when it came to seeing the effects (and often the existence) of childhood trauma. The only people I really felt were telling the truth were my patients – who at that time were all traumatized Vietnam combat veterans. I did, however, read, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, and found that largely excellent.

I quickly became disenchanted with the psychology field – with one exception: I absolutely LOVED being a therapist. After I finished my first year of work with veterans, I began working on a psychiatric ward for women with eating disorders and for people with severe depression who were receiving electroshock therapy. The whole experience was hell – though extremely enlightening. Now I saw the true horror of the mental health field. Therapy on the psych ward – at the “esteemed” New York State Psychiatric Institute – was a joke, and no one took childhood trauma seriously, despite the fact that behind my closed doors most of my patients told stories of severe childhood trauma, including incest, violence, and deprivation. But my colleagues reduced everything to biological causes and biological treatments. Medication was king.

Remembering Drama of the Gifted Child, I returned to reading Alice Miller, first Thou Shalt Not Be Aware and then For Your Own Good, and suddenly I realized her value: she was a downright maverick in the psychology field. She had clearly confronted the same psychological idiocy and blindness amongst her colleagues that I was finding among mine – and had written about it! Suddenly I had an ally, and she became my hero. (I even wrote to her a couple of times, but she never answered.) That said, I had a few niggling suspicions about her, things I didn’t quite like, but in light of the value she was providing me as an ally and a witness in the bowels of mental health hell, I didn’t care. Alice Miller was God.

However, none of my colleagues were even curious about what she had to say. Nor were my professors or fellow students in graduate school. That said, I had one friend in my personal life who had read her, and he and I talked about her at length, which helped. But aside from him I was on my own.

Meanwhile, I remember anytime I would read a new psychology book by a different author – or even when I considered buying a new psychology book – I would assess its value by looking up “Alice Miller” in the index. Occasionally I found her there. Mostly it was just some silly and content-devoid reference to The Drama of the Gifted Child, which was better than nothing, though from time to time I found an author who was clearly in massive denial of childhood trauma and took a stab at her and criticized her as being unfounded in her ideas. But the far majority of psychology writers just ignored her completely – and didn’t reference her at all. It was as if she – and childhood trauma – simply didn’t exist. How convenient.

In the years 2000 and 2001 I read everything Alice Miller published, and tons of stuff by her and about her on the internet. I even wrote a few book reviews about her works on amazon.com – though they were largely uncritical reviews. She was still my hero – as she still is to some degree. But things were beginning to shift for me.

By early 2001 I was working fulltime as a paid therapist, graduate school was over, and I had become much more independent. I was seeing thirty or forty patients a week in outpatient therapy – in a not-for-profit clinic in New York City – and I felt quite confident in my abilities. I found that I didn’t need Alice Miller’s support as much as I had in the past – mostly because I’d internalized it and integrated it into my personality. It was then that I found myself in a safer position to study her more objectively – even to criticize certain aspects of her work and point of view. I was troubled that her ideas hadn’t developed much after the publication of her first three books (from the early 1980s), and when I read her website I found it much more primitive than her writings of twenty years earlier. Also, I started sensing that she was playing the guru card, and encouraged others who shared her blindnesses – and often attacked or shunned those who didn’t.

At this point I became very curious what others had written in criticism of her – and I began a search to track down their writings. To my dismay, I found nothing, or I should say, nothing of value. Yes, there was some critical writing about her, but these authors were so obviously in profound denial of their own childhood histories that their criticisms were a joke, though a scary joke when you consider that most of them were “experts” with PhDs or MDs. On the flip side, most of what everyone else wrote about her was so blindly praising, to the point of sycophantic, that it too was useless.

I felt very alone with my rudimentary criticisms of her work – such as of her tacit approval for not-fully-healed parents to have children, which was a set-up for abuse – and I didn’t know where to turn. So I turned to myself. I looked within – and began to trust myself even more. I continued working as a therapist for a few more years, transitioning into private practice, and eventually, in mid-2004, I took a shot at writing some of my own criticisms of Alice Miller. The piece I wrote wasn’t too long, but in encapsulated my ideas about her, and I realized I had created something very new – and I realized I needed to share it with the world. So I decided to set up a website – www.iraresoul.com. (That originally stood for “Institute for the Rare Soul,” though the “Institute” never really materialized.) I started fleshing out the rest of my point of view in essay form, and I put it up in the summer of 2004.

I had no idea how to get traffic to the site, because I knew almost no one who was remotely interested in my ideas, so I joined several psychology web forums and shared my ideas there. Mostly they hated what I had to say, but a lot of people did check out my website, even if they criticized the hell out of it. I got a lot of hate mail from them – mostly anonymous – which was scary, but in an odd way fascinating. (I even got a few hostile – and anonymous – telephone calls, as I had my phone number on the site.) I’d spent most of my life trying to fit in and get along, and this was new. I’d never before been public about any of my radical ideas.

For a time, though, the fear I experienced became too much for me and I made myself anonymous on iraresoul.com, calling myself “Truthtraveler.” This was comfortable for many reasons. First and foremost was that my true ideas could be hidden from my colleagues – and even from my patients. (I have since noticed that an extremely miniscule percentage of therapists who have websites share much content on them – much less content of value. The standard way to make a therapy website is to make it brief, positive, uplifting, nurturing, general, and vapid. Original ideas are a big no-no: they just turn off potential clients, who are mostly looking for comfortable support – not a challenge to their core beliefs!)

It was unpleasant to be rejected because of my point of view, and it happened a lot. Most of my colleagues who read my website thought I was a freak. Some even told me so to my face. I was accused of trying to start a cult, of being pathologically consumed in my own history of childhood trauma, of unconsciously trying to sabotage my therapy practice, even of being masochistic. And certainly they didn’t refer patients to me anymore! Hiding behind “Truthtraveler” made things easier. I even slept better at night. (But at the same time I lived in fear that people would find out who I was and publicly “out” me. And some people did find out, either through hunting down old archives of my website, or by searching into the ownership of iraresoul.com – which had my name on it!)

Somehow my therapy practice kept its head above water, and I didn’t go under. And I kept thinking about Alice Miller, and kept hunting for other reasonable criticisms, and found nothing. In mid-2006 I decided to take the plunge and write a full-scale, serious review of Alice Miller and her work. I worked on it for a hefty chunk of time, and started by re-reading everything she had published up to that point – and a lot of her internet writings as well. When I completed the piece, all 16,000 words of it, I wondered what to do with it. I felt it was powerful, and I felt like I would be selling myself short to publish it under the name Truthtraveler. So I decided to change my website back to my real name. It was terrifying, but I felt it necessary.

That was over two years ago, and I have no regrets. Despite the fears and discomfort of being associated with radical ideas that cause me to be rejected by most of the norm, I have received benefits from my website – and particularly from that Alice Miller essay – that have been invaluable. I have met incredible and likeminded friends through it, new colleagues who don’t bury their heads in the sands of denial, and I have even gotten connected with some amazing new patients. Yes, generally the majority of my present-day colleagues mostly ignore my ideas, but what I have come to realize is that it’s not my ideas they’re really ignoring, but their own childhoods – and their childhood pain. And there’s nothing I can do to change that.

All I can do is keep on writing, keep on exploring my own childhood, and keep on growing!


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Testimonial #2: by Rebekah Shaw, psychotherapist in England

I was first given a copy of Alice Miller’s “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware” in 1992, and it changed my life. Suddenly, for the first time, I realised that I made sense, that I wasn’t that strange or different from other people, but that I had been made to feel that way because of my childhood. As a child I endured chronic and severe physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the hands of close relatives. Alice Miller’s perspective felt so radical and liberating to me because it provided me with a framework for understanding my experiences. Miller showed me that my thoughts, feelings, and behaviours – all that I had been brought up to see as failings, weaknesses, or just insanity – were in fact sensible, logical reactions to the impossible conditions under which I had grown up!

Reading Miller for the first time was an extraordinary revelation for me, and made it possible for me to continue to grow and develop as a person. Within a year I had read everything that Miller had written up to that point, and I quickly found myself struck by the wider implications of her ideas, namely the absolutely staggering impact of parental abuse of children on nations and cultures that are shaped entirely by abused, hurt, unenlightened individuals.

I tried discussing these ideas with friends and family, but most just thought Miller’s books were too extreme – and dismissed my ideas about the impact of abuse on society as being too related to my own experience. Over the next few years I made a few friends who grasped some of Miller’s ideas – because they too were beginning to face their own legacies of childhood trauma – and though I was able to talk with them to some extent, most were simply too involved in their own healing to be able to get into thinking about the theoretical implications of her work. In turn I also needed to focus my energy on my own healing, though privately I lamented the lack of like-minded people with whom to discuss my ideas.   

In 1994 I began studying for a degree in cultural studies with psychology as a subsidiary subject and found myself drawn to film studies, where psychoanalytic theory is used to unscramble the layers of meaning in film. I began using Miller’s ideas to develop an alternative system for analysing film, and eventually wrote my undergraduate dissertation using my system to analyse two films depicting "madness."  My dissertation was highly critical of the hopelessly outdated psychoanalytic theory taught on the university’s film studies courses. My work caused some consternation in my supervisor, with whom I’d previously enjoyed a good relationship. As an avid Freudian, she eventually refused to mark it, explaining that she didn’t feel she could be unbiased toward the inherently anti-Freudian stance I had taken! Though this was a stressful experience at the time, through it I developed a better understanding of people’s resistance to these ideas, an understanding which has been useful for me since.

As the result of all my studying of Miller’s work, something which I'd first noticed earlier began to bother me much more.  I saw an undeniable contradiction between her strong support for the abused child (and condemnation of the abusive nature of normative parenting) and her lack of serious exploration of how the tragedy of parental abuse might be prevented.  She seemed to be saying, “It’s terrible you were abused, and your parents had no right to treat you as an object to meet their needs, BUT it’s okay for you to go ahead and have children and pass your unmet childhood needs on to them!” 

This contradiction seemed so appalling to me and so antithetical to Miller's most powerful arguments that I reread her books to see if I’d missed the place where she’d said it’s not okay to have children if you have unprocessed trauma.  But I hadn’t missed it; she never said it.  Because of my high regard for Miller, however, I felt that she must’ve figured this out and then avoided facing the consequences of what her own work suggested.

At this point in my life I was a young woman who still hoped to be able to have children, and so on some level (and also because I lacked an ally with whom to discuss these issues) I did not really want to face the personal implications of such conclusions myself.  Whilst writing my dissertation in 1997, I had begun seeking out other people who might be thinking about these issues, or critiquing Miller’s stance, and at least a couple of times a year I searched through journals and websites. Sadly nothing ever came up.   

As I healed more and worked through more of my own issues, I decided, in 1999, to begin training as a counsellor/psychotherapist, and deliberately chose an integrative training that would enable me to develop my own model of therapeutic practise. I used my time in training to continue to develop my thinking about “Millerian” ideas – with the addition of my own insights – in a way that would benefit my clients therapeutically. Although there was little interest amongst the trainers on my course for my point of view, I was nevertheless supported in finding my own way of working. I felt it was safer to keep my own counsel about some of my more radical beliefs, though I did find this frustrating and limiting. Most of my fellow trainees were parents themselves and therefore almost universally unable to tolerate all but minimal amounts of Miller.  When I did raise her perspective they became too uncomfortable with the deeper implications of her work, namely that despite their “love” for their offspring they had caused (and in some cases were currently causing) incalculable damage to them.  Observing this phenomenon led me to think that many of Miller’s readers who were parents must reach similar conclusions to my own, or at least sense them, and then back away from them, horrified by the implications.  So few parents can admit the idea that they were not actually ready to have children and harmed them by their ignorance.

It has been pointed out to me that there are parents who embrace Miller’s ideas, but I have always found that when this appears to be the case their embracing is based on their superficial reading of Miller’s work. Other parents claim to love Miller’s ideas wholeheartedly, but when you try and find out how this has affected their parenting they usually say that her ideas don’t pertain to them because they never abused their children, despite all the evidence to the contrary.    

In August of 2006, four years after finishing my training I was, once again, doing my biannual search for criticisms of Alice Miller's work. By this point I had been working as a professional psychotherapist with children and adolescents for four years, which I found incredibly rewarding, yet also frustrating at times.  I’d been searching unsuccessfully for like-minded people for almost a decade, and my expectations were at an all-time low.  It was then that I stumbled upon a book review of “Thou Shalt Not be Aware” (the first book of Miller’s that I’d read, back in 1992!) on the United States’ amazon.com site. I read all the writer’s other book reviews and I was immediately struck by the possibility that this person was thinking along similar lines to me. The reviews were written by Daniel Mackler, and provided a link to iraresoul.com.  I read Daniel’s essays and decided to join his website’s forum straight away – a first for me! After reading others’ posts for a few days I began to join in with the vibrant and exciting discussions. I was utterly delighted and slightly incredulous to find people who seemed to be grappling with the problems caused by the abuse of children and the problems inherent in Miller’s work! I both hugely enjoyed and was challenged by my participation in the forum. Discussing these ideas with others really helped me solidify my beliefs, and as a result I became more committed to living my life according to my true ideals.  I am exceedingly fortunate to have met a very significant and life-changing friend and ally through iraresoul.com and I sincerely hope others will gain from reading and viewing the ideas that Daniel shares here.